John Exnicios on Training USSR Dissidents

The Carnegie Council's U.S. Global Engagement program gratefully
acknowledges support for this project from the Alfred and Jane Ross
Foundation and Donald M. Kendall.

DAVID SPEEDIE: I'm David Speedie, director of the U.S. Global Engagement
Program at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The topic of the day is "The
End of the Cold War" project of the Carnegie Council, and I'm in New
Orleans to speak with an individual who can speak with great authority on that
subject, John Exnicios.

John, first of all, thank you for welcoming us into your home today. We greatly
appreciate this.

JOHN EXNICIOS: I appreciate your coming down to talk to me. I'm glad
to share whatever I can help you with.

DAVID SPEEDIE: I'm sure you can. Let's just get right into this.

You had a rich and rewarding association over what can only be described as
an epochal period of world history in the 20th century—namely, the end
of the Cold War—and specifically with Paul
Weyrich and Robert
Krieble. How did this come about? How did you meet Krieble and Weyrich?

JOHN EXNICIOS: My relationship with Weyrich goes back to about 1977.
He was founder of many conservative organizations, and one of them was a political
action committee, Free
Congress. He had a field team of political consultants. They were scattered
around the U.S. The person who represented the South was elected to the Louisiana
legislature, and he couldn't do the work anymore. My name was given to Paul
as a person who might be interested in working with him.

I was an attorney in New Orleans. He invited me up to Wisconsin, where they
were having one of their training conferences. I was hired by him to be the
southern representative for Free Congress PAC.

JOHN EXNICIOS: No. It was an individual by the name of Thompson. Jenkins
was close to Weyrich, but he never worked with the field team.

It was a part-time job. I was a full-time attorney. In every election cycle
we would start getting involved in political campaigns and serve as consultants
to challenger races. We didn't really get involved with incumbents. We felt
once they were elected, they were in pretty good shape. I was working, trying
to get conservative, mainly Republicans—it was a bipartisan PAC—elected
throughout the South.

To get to how this came about, it was 1988 and I was at Army Reserve summer
camp. I was up at Command and General Staff College in Virginia, Norfolk, and
I got a call from Weyrich asking me if I wanted to make a trip to the Soviet
Union to do political work. I said, "Sure would." That's the first
I found out about Bob Krieble and what he was trying to accomplish.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Specifically, how did the work in the Soviet Union come about?
I'm interested in your personal role in the training of the Inter-Regional
Group of Deputies. How did you position yourselves for that?

I remember there were some other initiatives going on at that time. For example,
Harvard's Kennedy School had some programs going. But yours seems to have had
real traction. You made some very interesting contacts.

JOHN EXNICIOS: My understanding is that Bob Krieble, when he retired
from Loctite,
was looking for something to do. He made inquiries in Europe as to what the
dissident movement was interested in.

They advised him that they were interested
in political training, because they had no experience in politics. Gorbachev
had opened up just prior to that, in March of 1989, the Inter-Regional
Group of Deputies in this new People's Congress that he had created.

Krieble was close to Weyrich through other associations, and he was familiar
with Weyrich's political activities in the U.S. They got together and decided
they would make a trip.

Our first trip over there was to Moscow, Budapest, and Tallinn, Estonia. Weyrich
invited several of his field people to come with him—myself, Jeff Butzke,
who was in the New York area, Paul Ogle, Bob McAdam. He took the team of people
who were doing American politics and put us together for this first trip to
the Soviet Union.

Basically, it was outreach fromArkady Murashev, who was the corresponding
secretaryof the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies, who made contact with
Krieble to get this thing going.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Murashev made the contact.

JOHN EXNICIOS: That's my understanding. He was the one who was on the
cutting edge of trying to make contacts in the West, and Krieble was there and
he responded.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Then you went to Yekaterinburg and met up with Yeltsin
and his people. Or that came later?

JOHN EXNICIOS: The people that were close to Yeltsin came to our first
conference that we had in Moscow. They were with us from the beginning. Actually,
the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies brought us into the whole orbit of being
able to travel in the Soviet Union. They set up our trip to Estonia and were
helpful in what we were trying to accomplish.

DAVID SPEEDIE: So you come to the Soviet Union with the basis
of training through the Free Congress Foundation, the principles of training
political organizing, and so forth. You traveled widely. This was not a Moscow-centric
operation. You said earlier that you had been to Magadan; you had been to the
Far East. You went basically over the entire Soviet space.
JOHN EXNICIOS: The model developed slowly. Our first trip was pretty much
a discovery for us to find out what was going on and what could be accomplished.
The fact that it was successful led us to try to do more conferences.

Eventually we got to the point where we started a Krieble Institute within the
Free Congress Foundation. As time passed, and relatively quickly, I was eventually
offered a job being director of the center that would be handling the conferences.
We went to a program of about four trips overseas a year, with three cities
on each conference, which would last about two weeks. Then we would also do
what we eventually called mini-conferences, where one individual might go overseas
and do one-day conferences in several cities.

But it wasn't a plan that was developed before we left. Slowly ideas developed
as we went along.

DAVID SPEEDIE: What interface did you have of any kind with the embassy in
Moscow at that point?

JOHN EXNICIOS: We really had very little contact with anything in the
U.S. government. It was a wonderful circumstance for me because I didn't have
to do any fundraising. Bob Krieble could fund the organization. We had very
little red tape. We could do what we wanted to do, when we wanted to do it,
very efficiently.

Before we went to Moscow, we were going to Budapest for our first conference.
The night that we arrived, we were having dinner with the people that were supposed
to be attending and putting on the conference for us, and they advised us that
the conference was canceled. They didn't want to have anything to do with us.
It turns out that the embassy had advised them not to deal with us. Our Budapest
conference was pretty much deep-sixed by the U.S. embassy.

What we then did in Budapest was to make contact with other political parties
and had some small meetings, where we tried to tell them what we were trying
to accomplish. But there was really no support from the U.S. government in what
we were trying to do.

DAVID SPEEDIE: You were very much flying solo here and making your own contacts.
Obviously, there were other important people, dissidents, at this point in time
that were well known in the West. I think of Sakharov
and his wife, Yelena
Bonner. Were they involved in your enterprise at all?
JOHN EXNICIOS: Sakharov died very shortly after we began our work. I met
Bonner on the first trip to Moscow. I'm not sure about the date. He may have
died just before we got to Moscow for the first time.

Basically, we were involved with all of the key dissidents that were working
in the Soviet Union. They were the network that would get us into places in
Armenia and Georgia. We covered probably 13 of the 15 republics.

Originally, we were working with the Academy of Sciences. You had to have a
host who would invite you to come to Russia. After things began to break up,
we stopped that relationship, and we were able just to get our visas by applying
to the Russian embassy—the Soviet embassy at the time—and go to places
we wanted to go. It was remarkably free, in the sense that we could do what
we wanted to do. It was as if the Soviet Union didn't know what we were doing
and paid very little attention to us.
DAVID SPEEDIE: You really think that was it? There was just a knowledge gap
of who you were talking to and what their role was?

JOHN EXNICIOS: Looking back on it in retrospect, for them to allow a
foreign group of people to come into their country, to go pretty much where
they wanted to go and give the support that we were giving to the dissidents
is a result of them not being competent to understand what was happening.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Are you still in contact with Murashev, for example, or you mentioned
Reznikov and some others.

JOHN EXNICIOS: We had a group of probably about 40 or 50 field people
that we hired in the various republics and also satellite states. I'm in touch
with maybe ten of them still. I speak on Skype with some of them, email them.
I have made several trips back overseas. But most of them have gone off the
radar. I couldn't locate them now.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Before we sat down to talk, you showed me some pictures of a
remarkable group of young activist types from 13 of the 15 former Soviet republics.
You haven't really tracked their progress?

JOHN EXNICIOS: In some cases. I know one of them is living in New Orleans
now. After I quit working for Krieble, he wanted to go to university and I got
him in at the University of New Orleans. He's married, has an American child,
and he's getting citizenship. I know a couple have moved to Canada. One is a
doctor in Minnesota. Some of them have emigrated. Some of them have passed on.
The life expectancy in Russia isn't real high. Some of them I haven't had contact
with in a good while.

It's such a broad area. Over the past 20 years, I have gone back maybe eight
or nine times, and I have seen some of them. But others it's just hard to keep
up with.

DAVID SPEEDIE: When I look at that group, I immediately think of another
phenomenon of the past 20 years, more recently, the color
revolutions—the Orange
Revolution in Ukraine, similar upheavals in Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia,
and so forth. Do you see this as somehow a legacy of what you helped put in
place? Is that too fanciful?

JOHN EXNICIOS: I'm not sure that I want to give us that much credit for
what was put in place, because this would have happened no matter what. We were
a small organization, spending maybe $1 million to $2 million a year in an enormous
area. What we did was cutting-edge. We were advanced over other people. It was
a remarkable experience, but I wouldn't want to take credit for what would have
unfolded anyway.

We trained maybe 5,000 people over there. Just thinking back, I made 40 trips
to the empire during that period, doing three conferences a trip. That's 120
conferences. There were maybe 5,000 to 7,000 people that we trained at the seminars.
I'm sure some of those people are involved. Some of them have been elected to
things. Some of them are still involved. Obviously, certain countries are more
advanced than others. People in Croatia are involved in politics; politics are
pretty much dead in Russia, in my opinion.

It varies widely as to what they have done. Some have become businessmen. Some
have come to the U.S. Unfortunately, a lot of the best people have left over
there.
DAVID SPEEDIE: I assume that your role as a lawyer, was in advising and training
in the legal foundation and framework for new democratic—

JOHN EXNICIOS: The way it developed was, first we were doing political
competence: How do you win elections?

It was basically how you do opposition research, how you understand the election
mechanisms, how you identify voters, how you turn them out. Once we had some
success and they were becoming elected to positions in city and regional government,
we put on governance conferences on how government functions, talking about
balances of power, ethics in government, and things like that. We also started
putting on a parallel track at the same time where we would put on business
conferences about free enterprise and how to start a business.

We trained in three different areas—election technology, governance, and
business.

As far as the law goes, the legal structures were there, but they were such
shams that there really wasn't a lot of legal advice that would come from a
lawyer. It was more like, what did you learn in seventh-grade civics class?
Most of the people that we worked with were physical scientists and doctors.
The lawyers were the people who were the worst to deal with in the Soviet Union
at the time.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Do we have something to learn from that?

JOHN EXNICIOS: I guess there is, on the margins.

DAVID SPEEDIE: All this was done without hindrance? I know you said this
before.

JOHN EXNICIOS: A city had to be open. When we went to Nizhny Novgorod,
we were probably the first Americans to ever go there because that had been
a closed city. We had to wait sometimes for a city to be open. But basically
we would sit down, Krieble would say, "Where are we going to go?"
and I would try to come up with three cities that would be interesting for Weyrich,
Krieble, and myself, that were somewhat geographically able to make the connections.

Logistically it was more, could we make flights, and were there connections?
There was no real support that we needed from the Russian government that the
Inter-Regional Group of Deputies couldn't get us.

When we would go there, sometimes we would stay at the Intourist hotels,
if we were in a city that had tourists. Other times we would stay at the Octoberskya
hotels, which were the hotels for the Russian dignitaries. We weren't just going
in there because we showed up and said, "We want to stay at the dignitary
hotel." It was because the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies was doing something.

But on my end, I would go down to the Soviet embassy and get the visas. On their
end, they would take care of the logistics.

DAVID SPEEDIE: It was Robert Krieble himself who basically did the research
as to where you should go and scheduled the—

JOHN EXNICIOS: Not really. He wanted to make interesting trips. He would
come up with a place he wanted to go. To be honest, we were interested in Russian
culture, Russian history, so what are the places we would like to go?

There were so many places to go. It wasn't like it had to be a place you had
to go. A lot of it was driven by either Weyrich's interest in some issue or
Krieble's. Or, frankly, since I got to make the decision as to what was recommended,
I put my opinion in.

DAVID SPEEDIE: It's interesting, what you just said. There was a genuine
interest in Russian history, culture, and place in the world that helped define
this political process.
JOHN EXNICIOS: Krieble got into this because he disliked communism. He wanted
to do something to end communism. I got into it because it was fascinating.
Obviously, I was anticommunist, but, to me, the whole culture—every trip
was interesting, no matter where we were going, because it was so unknown to
us.

As I mentioned, I was on reserve duty when Weyrich called me. We may have watched
a meeting about how the Russians were ten feet tall and they had 15,000 tanks
in Germany. There was no thought going on that the empire was about to collapse.
As soon as you got off the plane and started looking around, you realized that
what we were being told in the West was not what was actually going on there.

It was truly fascinating—the people, the food, everything. It was different.
If you have any interest in other cultures and societies—I was a very lucky
person.

DAVID SPEEDIE: So it seems.

You said something a few minutes ago in passing about what has happened in Russia
since that time. This is the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, the
topic at hand for us at the Council. Twenty years on, speak a little bit more
to how you view developments in Russia and the state of U.S.-Russia relations.
In this regard, what has been the legacy of what you did?

Obviously, there was an interesting moment when former President Bush
famously spoke of looking into Putin's
eyes and seeing his soul. There is apparently a cordial relationship between
the current presidents of the two countries and so on. How do you see it?

JOHN EXNICIOS: First, I would say that I look at it as more than just
Russia. While Russia is the most important state, what happened in the Czech
Republic, the Baltics, freedom to Ukraine and other republics is also part of
the story. If we go just to Russia, I'm of the opinion that politics is dead.
There are no opposition parties.

There's some sort of a charade that goes on where you may have Zhirinovsky
stirring up the nationalists and you have Zyuganov
with the communists. But it's all a kabuki play which is controlled. There is
no free debate. As one of my Russian friends told me, politics in Russia is
boring. It doesn't exist.

What happened in the Soviet Union is just as important for freeing millions
of other people as the failure of democracy in Russia.

The other thing—you haven't asked me this—also interesting is, I have
also worked with an organization that has brought many Russians and Ukrainians
to the U.S.—
DAVID SPEEDIE: I was going to get to that. I'm glad you mentioned it.

JOHN EXNICIOS: I'm meeting a lot of young Russians who were six years
old when this happened. They are coming over here, and they have very little
knowledge of what was going on in their country at the time. They are not particularly
upset by the lack of political freedom. They can travel now. They have access
to goods. It's an entirely different mentality of what's going on in the young
people in Russia now compared to the Russians that we were working with 20 years
ago.

I have done work with Open
World, which is a project funded by the U.S. Congress, through the Library
of Congress. They bring groups of Russians for one-week periods to the U.S.
I would host them when they were in New Orleans. I have met a lot of Russians
through that over the past 11 years.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Politics in Russia is seen as boring by Russians because it's—

JOHN EXNICIOS: The Russians that I speak to see it as no politics. You
have Putin, who has a guy who is shorter than he is as president, who does whatever
he says to do. They create the myth that he's the good czar—he might be
the one who is going to really be a democrat—and Putin is firm. Then you
have the left and the right, a false opposition.

There is really no politics. The only democrat that actually tried to do something
in the last election was Garry
Kasparov. He's independent. He has money. He could speak. His little party
did absolutely nothing. We would meet with him frequently when we would go to
Moscow.

Murashev was the manager of the Russian chess team. He's very close to Kasparov.

Truthfully, I don't see any politics in Russia. There is less politics than
there was during the Soviet period, because at least you could watch the Politburo,
some sort of party doing something. But now it's pretty much run by the KGB
aides of Putin, in my opinion. I could be entirely wrong. But I don't see much
there as a political opposition.

DAVID SPEEDIE: You mentioned Kasparov, who is obviously a charismatic figure,
and Bonner we mentioned before—these were people of some substance and
charisma. But you think they have just been essentially—

JOHN EXNICIOS: A lot of them have left. Some of them have been co-opted.
The situation was entirely different. It was very dismal. Things were clearly
wrong in the Soviet Union. They had people who realized, "We have to change
what we're doing." In my opinion they are taking the oil wealth—Russia
is basically a mineral-exporting state now—and instead of subsidizing Nicaraguans
and Cubans, they are subsidizing Russian people. The Russian people are living
somewhat better off of the oil wealth than they were before. The oligarchs and
the people that are in power are living very much better.

But the safety valve is there. You have a lot of Russians who are able to leave,
who want better lives. Then you do have better lives for some of the young people,
where they do have jobs, for some, and they do have a better standard of living,
because they are putting more of their oil proceeds into maintaining the population.
DAVID SPEEDIE: We had a very interesting conversation before we came on camera
about the domestic situation here and how you came to work with Paul Weyrich
and Robert Krieble. It was around the question you put of how to get conservatives
to come to the polls. Talk a little bit about that point, where the conservatives,
especially the Christian right, did not take part in the political process and
how that dynamic unfolded.

JOHN EXNICIOS: As I mentioned, I started working for Weyrich in 1977.
I covered the South. It was very difficult for Republicans, or conservatives,
to get elected in the South. The main problem that we had there was a demographic
which was apolitical. In those days, the Christian right was apolitical. They
were trying to find some reasons for Christians to get involved, and we weren't
that successful.

The Moral
Majority was created, and various other Christian right organizations began
to get more involved in the issue of abortion. But Christians basically were
not of this life; they were of the other. A large portion of the evangelicals
didn't want to get into politics.

My recollection is that Israel was offered to them as part of their fundamental
philosophy, that for Armageddon to come and to find Heaven, there had to be
the re-creation of the Jewish state and it had to be protected. Israel was brought
into the dynamic to attract Christian ministers into getting politically involved.

This has nothing to do with what we were doing overseas. What we taught overseas
was how to build coalitions and how to find something that people would be interested
in.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Yes, that's why I mentioned before the nexus between what you
did here and then what you tried in the former Soviet Union.

JOHN EXNICIOS: Basically, what we did here was teach a system of grassroots
politics. We weren't working with campaigns that were rich in funds, but we
were working with campaigns that could get a lot of people into the streets
to knock on doors and to identify and turn out voters. That worked very well
in the Soviet Union.

Obviously, when you have big blocks of flats with lots of people living in flats,
those are easy groups to work with. You couldn't use the telephones at the time,
because they didn't have that many phones. Mail was somewhat effective, in some
regions. Some of the things that we could do here, we could do there.

It was fascinating for us, because we learned a lot, by doing things over there,
as to how people function.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Good point.

One name I forgot to mention, by the way, just to get back to Russia, Mayor
Popov,
in Moscow.

What was your interaction with him?

JOHN EXNICIOS: Popov was with the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies. We
met him at our first conference. Not too long after that, he was elected to
be mayor—or he was appointed mayor; I'm not sure. But he became mayor of
Moscow. Arkady was appointed by him to be the chief of police.

He was an outstanding individual. He was more of an academic than a politician,
and he probably wasn't suited for being mayor of Moscow, with the way things
were working at that time. My understanding is that he resigned after a year
and a half or so. Then they had Luzhkov
for almost two decades or more.

DAVID SPEEDIE: That's right. But you don't keep in touch with Popov?

JOHN EXNICIOS: No.

DAVID SPEEDIE: The last thing before we wind up, on this general topic,
John. You were kind enough to give me a book
about Robert Krieble. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Is there a wide Krieble archive available? Was a film produced on the training
in the former Soviet Union?

JOHN EXNICIOS: I remember that we videotaped that first conference in
Moscow. We actually did bring a film crew with us on one series of trips and
they did film it. To be honest, I don't know what happened to that movie. We
filmed three conferences with an American film crew that we brought with us.

As far as archives go, it is whatever Free Congress has. Paul died two years
ago. He was the lifeblood of the organization. I'm not sure what they have in
their archives. It would be interesting to see those films.

DAVID SPEEDIE: When we go to Moscow, we may find out.

JOHN EXNICIOS: Well, that would be in America. The Russians filmed that
first conference in Moscow. They reproduced that and they gave it to other members.
I had forgotten. We did bring a film crew from America to do a filming for American
purposes. But I don't recall what purpose we made of it.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Your relatively negative impression of Russia—what do
you see as the success stories? You mentioned Hungary as one of your first.
Who were your contacts there? How was that?
JOHN EXNICIOS: We didn't do as much work in the republics or the satellite
states that were closer to Eastern Europe and had better connections, because
we were overtaken by events so quickly. Other than our first trip to Hungary
and another later conference, we really didn't do much there.

We had one conference in East Germany, but East Germany was taken care of by
West Germany. The Czech Republic was so advanced that before we could go back
for a second trip, they were making progress.

I suspect we spent most of our time in Ukraine, Russia and the Russian republics.
We could only put on so many conferences, and there were so many places. We
hit just about every country more than once. But I wouldn't want to suggest
that just because we went to a place twice and gave two conferences that we
did anything that would be altering of the whole landscape—although, on
the other hand, you don't know what people have done with that information that
you did give them.

DAVID SPEEDIE: This has been fascinating. I'm interested in what you're doing
now. You are retired as an attorney. What keeps you busy?

JOHN EXNICIOS: I babysit. I have a granddaughter that lives two blocks
away, so I get her a lot.

I stay in touch with Russians that come
over here. Until recently, I was hosting them. One year I had six groups in
my house. I had six weeks of Russians staying here. I try to stay in touch over
there. I get to go back occasionally. My son is in the military, and he's an
attaché in the Army. I have visited him in Ukraine, and he'll be going
to Moscow for three years shortly, so I anticipate going back.

Basically, I garden, cook. I'm retired.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Did you ever take up chess or any great Russian—

JOHN EXNICIOS: No.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Ever play with Kasparov?

JOHN EXNICIOS: No. I had supper with him.
DAVID SPEEDIE: What's he like, Kasparov?

JOHN EXNICIOS: He was a very personable and warm guy, very down-to-earth.
He was with his friends when I was there. I didn't speak Russian, so I was relying
on translators. But I was impressed by him as an individual.

DAVID SPEEDIE: John, thank you again for taking the time to speak to this
enormously important topic. It really is an archival moment. It has been enormously
helpful to us in trying to reconstruct and learn from what you and others did.

JOHN EXNICIOS: Thank you. I appreciate being able to tell the story and
give a little credit to Bob Krieble and Paul Weyrich for what they did.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Very good. Thank you.